WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- The Khan network had spread its tentacles across the globe, making nuclear components at workshops in Europe and Southeast Asia, says a Washington-based nuclear monitoring agency.
The network, headed by now disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had supplied sensitive nuclear components Iran, Libya for building uranium enrichment plants.
In February, Khan, now under house arrest in Pakistan, confessed to supplying nuclear technology to the two Muslim states and also to North Korea, but the extent of his involvement with Pyongyang is not yet known.
In a recent report on this nuclear black market, the Institute for Science and International Security says that the centrifuges the network sold to Iran and Libya are formally called Pakistan 1 and Pakistan 2 but are better known by their acronyms, P1 and P2.
They are used for uranium enrichment and were deployed in large numbers by Pakistan's gas centrifuge program. The P1 centrifuge uses an aluminum rotor, and the P2 centrifuge uses a maraging steel rotor.
The components for roughly 500 P1 centrifuges that went to Iran in the mid-90s were from centrifuges that Pakistan had retired from its main centrifuge program. Members of the Khan network were able to remove them in secret and sell them to Iran.
Libya received 20 of its P1s in that manner. Libya also bought about 200 P1 centrifuges from the wider network. At least some, if not all, of the components of the additional 200 P1s were made outside Pakistan at workshops under contract with companies in the network. Aluminum rotors, for example, were made in Malaysia.
The P2 centrifuges, which are more advanced machines, reportedly left Pakistan in much smaller numbers. The two that were sent to Libya, for example, were samples or demonstration models. One of the P2s that went to Libya was not suitable for enrichment with uranium hexafluoride gas. It did not have the final surface coating necessary to prevent corrosion by uranium hexafluoride gas.
In the case of Libya, the network focused on making P2 components outside Pakistan. The Libyans have told U.S. investigators that they placed an order for 10,000 P2 machines. Since each centrifuge has roughly 100 different components, this order translates into a total of about one million components, a staggering number of parts given the sophistication of gas centrifuge components. The network was assembling an impressive cast of experts, companies, suppliers, and workshops to make all these components.
The workshops that contracted to make components for the network typically imported the necessary items, such as metals, equipment, or subcomponents. After they made the item, they would then send it - either assembled or as a finished centrifuge component - to Dubai under a false end-user certificate. Then it would be repackaged and sent off to Libya.
The ISIS report quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the IAEA, as saying that "nuclear components designed in one country could be manufactured in another, shipped through a third, assembled in a fourth, and designated for eventual turn-key use in a fifth."
U.S. and British investigators allowed to inspect Libya's nuclear plant identified roughly half a dozen key workshops that were making or doing final assembly of the centrifuge components. The network selected a workshop based on the type of centrifuge component needed and the materials and equipment involved in making those particular components.
The most well known workshop was located in Malaysia at a company called SCOPE. The parts seized on a German ship, BBC China, in Italy last year, were from SCOPE. U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters earlier this year that the ship had been en route to Libya but was diverted to an Italian port so that U.S. investigators could seize the content.
SCOPE was also near the company that made the aluminum rotors for the 200 P1 centrifuges that Libya imported from the network.
The network contracted with SCOPE to make thousands of 14 different high precision aluminum centrifuge components for Libya's order. The contract with SCOPE involved up to about 15 percent of the total number of components sought by the network for Libya.
Workshops in Turkey made the centrifuge motor and frequency converters used to drive the motor and spin the rotor to high speeds. These workshops imported subcomponents from Europe and elsewhere, and they assembled these centrifuge items in Turkey. Under false end-user certificates, the components were then shipped to Dubai for repackaging and shipment to Libya.
SCOPE did not make the P2 centrifuges' maraging steel parts, which comprise the bulk of the rotating components in a centrifuge and are more difficult to make than the aluminum parts.
It has not yet been determined which workshop, if any, was contracted to make the sensitive maraging steel rotor and bellows. The network appears to have experienced trouble in finding a workshop to make these components.
Libya also ordered from the network a sophisticated manufacturing center, code-named Workshop 1001, to make centrifuge components. The original plan called for this center to make additional centrifuges after the network delivered the first 10,000 centrifuges, either to replace broken ones or add to the total number of centrifuges. However, if the network had difficulty making a component for the original 10,000 machines, this center may have had to make that particular component.
Most of the machine tools, furnaces, and other equipment for the center came from Europe, particularly from or through Spain and Italy. The equipment was not on the nuclear dual-use list, but it was still adequate for use in a centrifuge manufacturing program, particularly because the network also supplied detailed manufacturing information for almost all the parts. The bulk, if not all, of this equipment was sent to Libya via Dubai.
